We received a link recently from an Advanced Selling Podcast Listener to an article in Forbes called 10 Reasons Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent.

In this video, Bill Caskey reviews the Forbes list then comes up with one of our own on HOW TO GROW YOUR TEAM’S TALENT.

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The Painful Truth About Uninspiring Leaders: How Leadership Deficits Lead to Employee Disengagement

Video Transcription:

Number one, they’ve said that bureaucracy really creates problems for people. The more bureaucratic your organization becomes, if they can’t talk to the people that make the decision, it’s going to be really tough to keep good people.

Second is no passion and what that means is no passion for the projects you’ve given. It doesn’t mean you don’t have passion at all. It means the job requirements and the passion they have to expend don’t mix.

Third, poor annual reviews. It doesn’t mean they’ve gotten bad in your reviews. It means they’ve got no annual reviews. So if you have a team, make sure that at least annually – and personally, I think it should be even more frequently than that. Sit down and talk to people and get them to review you. You review them.

Number four, no long term career discussion. They said it’s amazing. Ninety some percent of organizations don’t really have too much of a career discussion with people. Well, if you’re an organization especially something that’s over $50 million or $100 million in revenue and you have good people, have a career discussion. Talk about where they want to go in their life.

Number five, shifting whims. I see this a lot in organizations where one day on a Monday it’s about generating new business from current clients and then by Wednesday it’s now forget that, let’s go generate new business for brand new clients. So make sure that your whims aren’t shifting. Make sure you have a plan and stick to it.

Number six, no accountability. Now this doesn’t mean that they don’t demand accountability from someone else. It means they aren’t held accountable. People do like accountability as long as they’re not micromanaged.

Number seven, top talent attracts top talent. This is so true. If you’ve got a sales organization, it has got 25 people in it and three are high producers and the other 22 are low producers, don’t expect to attract a bunch of great talent because they’re going to see what they have to work with and they’re not going to be attracted to that.

Number eight, missing vision. We hear a lot about this. Do you have a vision? Do people know it?

Lack of openness. Do you give your people a chance to come in and feedback on you? Do you do 360s? Do you give them a chance to say, “Here’s what I need more of, here’s what I need less off”?

Number ten, who’s the boss? It could be that people leave organizations because they don’t get along well with their boss. The statistic that Hogan talks about is over 70 percent of people would not work for their former bosses again and that tells me that a lot of times, you’re not very inspiring as a boss nor am I.

So that’s the Forbes articles. It talks about keeping talent. So now I’ve taken this a step further and I’ve said, well, we want to keep good talent, yes; but we also want to grow talent. I think it’s up to the leaders of the organization to make sure that your talent not only on the executive team but also throughout the organization grows and prospers and you nourish that growth because I sense that people usually are operating at about half to three quarters capacity.

So if you can keep them growing, you’re going to understand and get rewarded financially for that. So here are five things that I think you should be doing to grow your talent.

Number one, make sure their personality matches the job fit. Here’s a perfect example of that. A lot of times, we’ll bring a salesperson in or our clients will bring a salesperson in from the outside. They will look great on a resume. They will have great experience. They will supposedly be really good at what they do. They drop them into the field and they can’t sell anything and you look at their personality. We use the Hogan Assessment here but any personality tool will do. We look at the personality and they’re not hunters and yet you’ve put them at a position to go out and generate new business. They’re just not naturally good at that.

So a lot of times, the personality of the person, you got to test them. You can’t ask someone what their personality is or what their strengths are. You’ve got to test them. Does that match the job? If it doesn’t, you’re going to have trouble. If it does, that’s how you’re going to get growth.

Number two, engagement. There is a statistic out there, if I can only say the word, a statistic that says that only half the people are really engaged in their work. Well, if you have disengaged people and it could be because of your leadership skills or another team member’s problems, peers, you probably aren’t getting feedback on that; and so to the extent that we have an engaged workforce and we have to go out and find out if they’re engaged, get them to tell us whether they are or not, that’s going to help grow talent. People who are engaged, you get feedback from. You can start to fix problems.

Number three, reinvention. We started talking a lot about reinventing the sales process, reinventing leaders, reinventing your company. We should always be working on reinventing ourselves no matter how old we are. Because why? The market demands it. So every person in your organization should be thinking, “How can I do my job better? How can I reinvent the processes around here to make sure that people are more inspired, people are more motivated, people are more compelled to bring out their best everyday when they come in?”

Number four, a quarterly discussion on development. Remember back in the Forbes article, it says annual reviews. We didn’t have very many of them. Forget the annual reviews. Do quarterly reviews. Sit down with your people individually once a quarter not for seven or eight hours but for 30 minutes to an hour and say, “How are we doing? What do you need help with? Where do you need to develop?” You can’t tell the person where they need to develop although you can have a little input on it. I want people to come to you, your team and say, “Here’s what I need, Mister Leader. Here’s where I need help. Here’s where I need additional skills.” Have that quarterly.

Number five, make everybody own something. If you’ve got a team of 10 salespeople and they own their territory, sure that’s one thing but give them special projects. One of our clients has a special project where they’re erecting a blog online and all the salespeople are going to contribute to that. One of the sales guys is a really good writer, understands blogging, has been doing it on his own for a while. He was put in charge of that. He’s not making any more money on it but it causes him to be really engaged in the business and it causes his peers to see how excited he gets.

Make sure everybody owns something. When you do that, talent grows. I would appreciate your comments if you have any, positive or negative.